Category Archives: deepsky

The constellation Virgo is home to the Virgo galaxy cluster, the largest in our vicinity (if you count millions of lightyears as vicinity). The image above are individual crops from an image taken with a 60mm refractor telescope.

Even after more than two hours of exposure the image of the reflection nebula M78 and it’s surroundings is quite grainy. This object needs much more exposure. When pushing the raw files to bring out the faint nebulosity the background becomes a bit streaky, therefore I kept the image quite dark.

After a long spell of clouds, snow and rain, clear skies have returned. Apart from the streak artefacts in the background I like this image a lot, this is my first properly focused image with the Baader h-alpha filter.

On December 26th we were invited to christmas dinner at my sisters place. I brought the Vixen Polarie, the Takahashi FS-60CB and the Nikon D750 to do some astrophotgraphy during the evening.

The image above records some faint nebulosity across central Orion. From the horsehead nebula B33 silhouetted against IC434 to the flame nebula NGC 2024. In the upper left, the M78 nebula with its surrounding NGC objects is also visible. In the corner a hint of Barnards loops is discernible

Barnard 33 is the horse-head shaped dark cloud silhouetted agains the glow of excited hydrogen which goes by the name of IC434. To the left is the Flame Nebula NGC2024, which is an odd nebula, because it is orange, and apparently a mixture between reflection and emission nebula.

Today I used a break in the clouds to test how the astro-modified Nikon D7000 works with a h-alpha Filter. As the weather was very unstable, I didn’t set up the laptop for guiding, so some images were unusable due to trailing and passing clouds and full cloud cover at the end of the exposure resulted in oly 83x30s unguided exposures. Which way too short, but I am happy with the result under these circumstances.

The California nebula is hydrogen gas which is irradiated by the intense UV radiaton from Xi Persei, the bright star near the center of the image. It is about 1250 light years distant and is one of the intrinsically brightest and hottest stars visible to the unaided eye. It weighs in at about 40 solar masses. The surface temperature is a whopping 35000 Kelvin.